Hansel and Gretel are back in the woods at Alberta Opera

Seven seasons ago, a musical-writing team with a specialty in reinventing fairy tales for kids, lit on the idea of creating something new for the repertoire’s most famous brother-sister duo. I refer of course to Hansel and Gretel, and their celebrated adventure in the deep dark forest, and the high-rent bungalow made entirely of candy.

Seven seasons ago, a musical-writing team with a specialty in reinventing fairy tales for kids, lit on the idea of creating something new for the repertoire’s most famous brother-sister duo. I refer of course to Hansel and Gretel, and their celebrated adventure in the deep dark forest, and the high-rent bungalow made entirely of candy.

Farren Timoteo and Jeff Unger, the joint artistic directors of Alberta Opera — the one specializing in the book, the other in the music — had already ventured into the woods once before. The previous year, their Little Red Riding Hood musical, their first original co-creation, had fixed its high beam on a soft-spoken heroine learning to stand up for herself against the school bully Wolfgang.

In 2009, as Timoteo explains, they’d decided to “try something different … Hansel and Gretel our own way!” That’s the musical the company is reviving, starting Friday in the Fringe Theatre Adventures season, as a tribute to the late composer Unger, who passed away in the summer of 2015.

It’s a measure of the highly unusual adult complexities of Unger’s music for kids — an Alberta Opera signature — that “our own way” meant, in this instance, “let’s start with Sondheim and Sweeney Todd!” laughs Timoteo. “We were both totally nuts about Sondheim; we were Sondheim junkies who’d pore over Sweeney Todd together, ‘Look what he’s doing here!’ ‘Look at that transition!’…. We got so excited about channelling our favourite musicals into this fairy tale universe.”

And since the original source, Grimm brothers story of siblings who get abandoned in a forest by an ineffectual dad and evil stepmother, isn’t exactly light-hearted, Sondheim’s atmospheric tale of the demon barber of Fleet Street seemed “quite justifiable!” says Timoteo cheerfully. “After seven years, I see it so clearly; the Sondheim in the show’s DNA. There was such a sophistication to Jeff’s score, but such accessibility, too, so pleasing to the ear!”

“Also, I’d just seen my first Jonathan Christenson (Catalyst) show, Frankenstein,” says Timoteo. “I was so inspired by its atmosphere, macabre but fun, and the way it broke the fourth wall (to talk to the audience).”

Which says something about the sassy sense of humour and musical theatre savvy at work in Timoteo/Unger shows for Alberta Opera. The title stars of Hansel and Gretel do their own narration, and step back into scenes: “The switch has its own mischievous energy,” says Timoteo. Hansel is the “younger, more impulsive, more temperamental one; Gretel is more logical and more cautionary.” The question the siblings confront is whether to settle for what they have, or take a gamble on future prospects, a conundrum that threads it way through the motivation of every hoofer who’s strapped on tap shoes for a Broadway audition.

The other characters, all played by the same actor, are similarly witty. The evil stepmother, for example, is a sultry German cabaret singer, à la Marlene Dietrich, who gets one of those classic musical theatre torchy numbers, I Want It All.

“We’ve always enjoyed not sapping the danger out of fairy tales,” says Timoteo. “If it’s managed well, in a fun way, there’s a real enjoyment in creating something a little bit scary.” We don’t meet the Witch till later in the show — “like Jaws!” laughs Timoteo — when her mythology has had a chance to grow.

“Our big theme is stoking the imagination, whether it’s imagining the Witch, a better life, a narrative that includes a candy house….”

For the current remount, which will tour to more than 70,000 school kids this season two performances a day, Deanna Finnman has updated the original costumes, with their witty mixture of Black Forest and German cabaret allusions. Stephian Bahniuk has re-designed the set and lighting. And Timoteo, who directs, has found a new cast of triple-threats: Jessica Andrews as Gretel, Jaclyn Keppler in a gender-bending turn as Hansel, and Adam Houston as Father and everybody else.

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